


Manuela's Room

by Rigil_Kentauris



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Gen, a character study AND a character's study how fun!!, agarthan!Manuela, character study disguised as story, in practice youll probably just be confused rather than spoiled if you havent played past that point, just kidding its her room not her study, light angst at the end, technically spoilers for midgame reveals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-11-02 00:23:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20558798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rigil_Kentauris/pseuds/Rigil_Kentauris
Summary: To say Manuela's room is a wreck would be to make a gross understatement.





	Manuela's Room

**Author's Note:**

> look if we acutally get to see manuelas room then id ont wanna know  
<strike>hhhhh just kidding i defo do, i rewatched like all supports and reread the chapters summaries trying to figure it out. i dont remember from my playthroughs</strike>

To say Manuela's room is a wreck, would be to make a gross understatement.

At any given point in time, there are no fewer than twenty-two full and separate outfits dumped across the wood plank floor. Some are rich embroidered explorations of the world's cloth production fields. Others are deep dyed tributes to something uncapturable. A few are strikingly simple silks.

_All_ of them are covered in an additional layer scattered scraps of paper. Notes coat the front and back of the hastily torn parchments. If one was quick, and clever, and very _very_ lucky, one could perhaps make out snatches of elegantly trite words of romance on them, all in different handwriting. If one was even luckier, one would entirely avoid looking at the field of papers, upturned furniture, and scattered healing herbs altogether. There _is_ a desk in the room, or, perhaps it's a desk. It looks vaguely desk shaped under the pile of blankets and blackout curtains and coats that have been slung all over every single bit of space. But for the haphazard stacked of essays resting on top of the whole assembly, one might assume the shape was a very small tent, pitched in the corner of Manuela's room by a somewhat tipsy architect, fresh out of a meeting with Church officials.

The sunbeams that eke in past the second set of heavy drapes often can be caught turning tail and running from the already crowded air. The room is devoid of any dust whatsoever - with new dresses being torn off and flung about, there's hardly any place for a hardworking speck of dust to put down roots. There are, however, endless chains of healing herbs stung on long woven braids of flax. The chains hangs from the exposed rafters of the ceiling, and drift ever so slightly in the breeze that squeezes past the window. The rustling is soft, ever so soft, a quiet muted babble that, if you stood directly in the middle, tilted your head, and covered one ear, might sound like far distant applause. Tilt too far, though, and the rustling curls around and scrapes, as if a parchment from the floor had shuddered to life and started slithering towards the exit. Best to close your eyes instead, and breathe in the delicate balance of scents phasing out from the crinkled leaves. Peppermint, sage. Lavender. Sometime unplacable, like dew on morning prairie grasses.The clean smell of imported soap,

The air lives.

The whole _room_ lives.

You can trace the path of the storm through the wake it leaves behind. And every day, a new constellation of loss and hope is strewn about, decipherable only by the changing cuts of the dresses on the ground, by the parting in the black drapes, by the freshness of the flowers that cover the corners.

To say Manuela's room is a wreck, would be to make a gross understatement. Manuela's room is chaos itself, the special kind of chaos that lives only in the heart of life itself. Not the ordered nature of a seed sprouting or a sun rising, but the lawless dynamic of a petal pulling wild ephemeral rays from where they boil in the sun's core.

Manuela's room isn't a wreck. It's alive.

Of course, there is another, simpler reason one could not say Manuela's room was a wreck.

In fact, one couldn't even say Manuela's room_ was_.

Certainly, the room in the monastery was one she inhabited, from time to time. Certainly it was the one in which, if asked, she'd say she lived.

But it wasn't hers.

No, that one, her home, lay far, far, _far_ away, buried under rock and secrets and legends.

The only thing _that_ room and her current one shared was one of those very special secrets.

Stay awake, far past night, far past the moon's rising. Far past the hour where curious students who are still out giggle to themselves about their audacity. Far past the hour when, without further prompting, lonely souls stumble back from the tavern and collapse onto the sheets. Far past the hour when you'd call it night, but still far from the hour where you'd call it day.

Stay awake then, and if you were a very bold little tuft of dust, or a shallow breeze, or even a shadow that had yet to find its place in the dark, you might see something incredible.

At that most peculiar hour, Manuela's room is _ablaze_ with light.

The blue, cool, steady, unforgiving, unforgetting, and uneasy light. An old light, a tired light, a defiant kind of light yet unseen in all the good, goddess touched land for millennia. The humming unnatural light shines ceaselessly from a multifaceted crystal-like object that bobs unbidden in the middle of the room.

And that breeze, or that dust, or that shadow shrinking away might be able to witness the figure in Manuela's room reach one trembling hand out to the crystal, brush its surface with a single hand, then withdraw as its owner curls tight on top of a blanket-devoid bed and chokes down silent tears.

**Author's Note:**

> why is soap hanging from the ceiling? you dont know and neither do i
> 
> anway, that light is modelled off the ones in the uhhhhhhh the place in the goddess's rite of rebirth place. the underground place. the one where people are trying to steal crest stones. that one. its the only place outside of shambhala where i saw freestanding possiblllllyy???? electric lights. so.


End file.
